“the word I should have used was not postmodernism but rather postmodernity: for I had in mind not a style but a historical period”
“after my initial work on what I would now call postmodernity, a new word began to appear, and I realized that this new term was what I had been missing from my original description. The word, along with its new reality, was globalization; and I began to realize that it was globalization that formed, as it were, the substructure of postmodernity, and constituted the economic base of which, in the largest sense, postmodernity was the superstructure.”
“The hypothesis, at that point, was that globalization was a new stage of capitalism, a third stage, which followed upon that second stage of capitalism identified by Lenin as the stage of monopoly and imperialism—and which, while remaining capitalism, had fundamental structural differences from the stage that preceded it, if only because capitalism now functioned on a global scale, unparalleled in its history. You will have understood that the culture of that earlier imperialist stage was, according to my theory, what we call modernity; and that postmodernity then becomes a kind of new global culture corresponding to globalization.”
“In my first descriptions of the postmodern (which I do not at all repudiate), I described the transition from the modern to the postmodern in terms of an increasing predominance of space over time. The classics of modernism were obsessed, in some profound and productive sense, with time as such, with deep time, with memory, with duration (or the Bergsonian durée), even with the eternal dawn-to-dusk of Joyce’s Bloomsday. I suggested that with the new primacy of architecture in the arts, and that of geography in economics, the new dominant of postmodernity was to be found in space itself, the temporal sinking to a subordinate feature of space as such.”
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“exhibits and cultural events are the equal of musicals or eagerly awaited films. In this new configuration, even the paintings of classics like Van Gogh or Picasso regain a new lustre; not that of their origins, but rather the novelty of widely advertised brand names.”
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“All of which suggests that the avant-garde in our time has been replaced by another kind of figure. Recalling the way in which, for cultural historians, the nineteenth-century figure of the conductor, as the charismatic director of an emergent collectivity of musicians of all kinds, might be said to emblematize the emergence in modern politics of the dictator; so also we might isolate from these practices of the new kind of museum the emblematic figure of the curator, who now becomes the demiurge of those floating and dissolving constellations of strange objects we still call art. Since I have so often been accused of disparaging philosophy to the benefit of that unclassifiable new kind of writing and thinking called theory, I probably have some kind of moral obligation to suggest that what has replaced philosophy in our own time, namely theory, is also perhaps a kind of curatorial practice, selecting named bits from our various theoretical or philosophical sources and putting them all together in a kind of conceptual installation, in which we marvel at the new intellectual space thereby momentarily produced.”
(The principle holds for academic courses as well; and would contrast older fixed canons or lists of classics with newer, ad hoc disposable canons. In philosophy, for example, you might contrast lists of the great philosophers with the collections of theoretical references bundled together in books like Anti-Oedipus, Empire, or Mazzadra and Neilson’s Border as Method, each of which would fill out a rich semester if not a whole curriculum. If I were a literary guest curator, I might well stock a Flaubert seminar with all his favourite readings, from The Golden Ass to Voltaire, if not his favourite readers, like Joyce.)
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“We now consume the very form of communication along with its content.”
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The postmodern event is a singularity, and a “singularity is a pure present without a past or a future.”
“Both these works [Xu Bing’s Leaves of Heaven and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder] are one-time unrepeatable formal events (in their own pure present as it were). They do not involve the invention of a form that can then be used over and over again, like the novel of naturalism for example. Nor is there any guarantee that their maker will ever do anything else as good or even as worthwhile (no slur on either of these illustrious artists is intended): the point being that these works are not in a personal style, nor are they the building blocks of a whole oeuvre. The dictionary tells us that the word ‘gimmick’ means ‘any small device used secretly by a magician in performing a trick’: so this is not the best characterization either, even though it is the one-time invention of a device that strikes one in such works. It is, however, a one-time device which must be thrown away once the trick—a singularity—has been performed.”
“Postmodern neo-conceptualism is not at all like that: with Xu Bing and the postmodern artistic production for which I take him to be paradigmatic, it seems to me that the situation is wholly different. His ‘texts’ are as it were soaked in theory—they are as theoretical as they are visual—but they do not illustrate an idea; nor do they put a contradiction through its paces, nor do they force the mind to follow the eyes inexorably through a paradox or an antinomy, in the gymnastics of some conceptual exercise. A concept is there, but it is singular; and this conceptual art—if that is what it is—is nominalistic rather than universal. Today therefore we consume, not the work, but the idea of the work, as in Lem’s imaginary book reviews; and the work itself, if we can still call it that, is a mixture of theory and singularity. It is not material—we consume it as an idea rather than a sensory presence—and it is not subject to aesthetic universalism, insofar as each of these artefacts reinvents the very idea of art in a new and non-universalizable form, so that it is in that sense even doubtful whether we should use the general term art at all for such singularity-events.”
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“centrality of the postmodern economy, which can succinctly be characterized as the displacement of old-fashioned industrial production by finance capital.”
[Product abstracted into commodity; commodity then abstracted again].
“the abstractions of modern art can be said to have reflected the first-degree abstractions of the commodity form itself, as objects lost their intrinsic use-value and were replaced by a different kind of social currency: modernist spiritualisms vied with modernist materialisms to render the ‘theological mysteries’ (Marx’s term) of this new object world.”
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“at the very heart of any account of postmodernity or late capitalism, there is to be found the historically strange and unique phenomenon of a volatilization of temporality, a dissolution of past and future alike, a kind of contemporary imprisonment in the present—reduction to the body as I call it elsewhere—an existential but also collective loss of historicity in such a way that the future fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like.”
“the deconstruction of postmodernity in terms of a dominant of space over time cannot ever, for the temporal beings we are, mean the utter abolition of temporality, however melodramatically I may have staged our current temporal situation in the essay referred to above. We have here rather to do with an inquiry into the status of time in a regime of spatiality; and this will mean, not Bergson’s reified or spatialized temporality, but rather something closer to the abolition, or at least the repression, of historicity.”
“a genuine historicity can be detected by its capacity to energize collective action, and that its absence is betrayed by apathy and cynicism, paralysis and depression.”
“Let’s rather think, if not dialectically, then at least psychoanalytically; and think of postmodern futurities as compensations for a present time paralysed in its protentions and retentions (to use Husserl’s language) and unable to project vigorous programmes for action and praxis under its own steam.”
“The world of finance capital is that perpetual present—but it is not a continuity; it is a series of singularity-events.”
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“So the postmodern philosophical positions I now want to outline are not to be understood as my own philosophical bias, although inasmuch as these constitute the doxa or the widespread opinions of the current moment, I am certainly not immune to their influence and attraction, any more than anyone else who participates actively in the life and culture of this period. Postmodern philosophy is most generally associated with two fundamental principles, namely anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism. These may be characterized, respectively, as the repudiation of metaphysics, that is, of any ultimate system of meaning in nature or the universe; and as the struggle against any normative idea of human nature. (Perhaps constructivism and a certain historicism may be added to these two principles.) It is generally identified by its adversaries—most of them modernists, even where they have spiritualist leanings—as relativism.”
“Now in a sense many of the modernists also believed these things (most of them, for example, are already to be found in Sartrean existentialism). But for the most part, the modernists tended to express such principles in accents of anguish or pathos. Nietzsche’s battle cry about the death of God was their watchword, along with various laments about the disenchantment of the world, and various purely psychological accounts of alienation and the domination of nature. What distinguishes postmodern philosophy, in my opinion, is the disappearance of all that anguish and pathos. Nobody seems to miss God any longer, and alienation in a consumer society does not seem to be a particularly painful or stressful prospect. Metaphysics has disappeared altogether; and if the ravages to the natural world are even more severe and obvious than in the earlier period, really serious ecologists—the radical and activist kind—do something about it politically and practically, without any philosophical astonishment at such depredations on the part of corporations and governments, inasmuch as the latter are only living out their innate instincts. In other words, no one now is surprised by the operations of a globalized capitalism: something an older academic philosophy never cared to mention, but which the postmoderns take for granted, in what may well be called Cynical Reason. Even increasing immiseration, and the return of poverty and unemployment on a massive world-wide scale, are scarcely matters of amazement for anyone, so clearly are they the result of our own political and economic system and not of the sins of the human race or the fatality of life on Earth. We are in other words so completely submerged in the human world, in what Heidegger called the ontic, that we have little time any longer for what he liked to call the question of Being.”
“Singularity, in other words, proposes something unique which resists the general and the universalizing (let alone the totalizing); in that sense, the concept of singularity is itself a singular one, for it can have no general content, and is merely a designation for what resists all subsumption under abstract or universal categories. The very word carries within it the existentialist’s perennial cry against system, and the anarchist’s fierce resistance to the state.”
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“The first two stages of capitalism, the period of national industries and markets, followed by that of imperialism and the acquisition of colonies, the development of a properly colonial world economy—these first two moments were characterized by the construction of otherness on a world scale. First, the various nation-states organized their populations into competing national groups, who could only feel their identities by way of xenophobia and the hatred of the national enemy; who could only define their identity by opposition to their opposite numbers. But these nationalisms quickly took on non-national forms as, particularly in Europe, various minorities and other language speakers evolved their own national projects. Then, in that gradual enlargement which is not to be confused with a later globalization, the systems of imperialism began to colonize the world in terms of the otherness of their colonized subjects. Racial otherness, and a Eurocentric or Americano-centric contempt for so-called underdeveloped or weak or subaltern cultures, partitioned ‘modern’ people from those who were still pre-modern, and separated advanced or ruling cultures from the dominated. With this moment of imperialism and modernity, the second stage of capitalism, a worldwide system of Otherness was established.”
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“I have touched on the preponderance of space over time in late capitalism. The political conclusion to draw from this development is plain: namely, that in our time all politics is about real estate; and this from the loftiest statecraft to the most petty manoeuvring around local advantage. Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as global scale. Whether you think of the issue of Palestine or of gentrification and zoning in American small towns, it is that peculiar and imaginary thing called private property in land which is at stake. The land is not only an object of struggle between the classes, between rich and poor; it defines their very existence and the separation between them.”
“Space and land: this seeming reversion to a feudal mode of production is then mirrored in the experimentation of the economic theorists with a return to doctrines of rent in connection with contemporary finance capital. But feudalism did not include the kind of temporal acceleration at the heart of today’s reduction to the present. How the latter can be grasped as spatialization, rather than, as some have suggested, the virtual abolition of space (in fact, the space they have in mind is the space between the various global stock exchanges), is a crucial representational problem for grasping postmodernity and late capitalism, and nowhere more urgent than in the calculation of political possibilities.”
“Manfredo Tafuri at his most sceptical interpreted the great critical and negative achievements of modernity—Marx, Freud, Nietzsche—as essentially demolition work that paved the way for late capitalism”